Using this site

This is the website of the Legal Services Society (Legal Aid BC), a non-profit organization mandated by the provincial government to provide legal aid in British Columbia, Canada.

The site is organized so that you can navigate by who you are (audience), what you want to do, and what you are looking for. Click on the links on the left and centre of the homepage to find what you need. You may also want to try our site map.

To navigate from anywhere on the site, click one of the audience buttons at the top of the screen and choose from the drop-down menus that appear under Legal aid, Lawyers, Community workers, News, and About us. For more options, return to the homepage of the entire site by clicking the Home button on the top of the screen.

The buttons at the bottom of the screen will also help you navigate from anywhere in the site: Home, Using this site, Site map, Contact us, Careers.

If you're on the Publications page, note that the tabs in the middle of the screen expand to reveal more information. In the right corner of each tab, click the plus sign to open the box, and click the minus sign to collapse it again.

The site also features a Search tool in the top right corner of the screen. It searches this site as well as other selected public legal information websites in BC.

All links to external websites open in a new window on your screen. To return to the Legal Aid BC site, close the new window by clicking the X in the top right of your screen.

Using Adobe Acrobat PDF files

The publications and many other materials on this website are posted as Portable Document Format (PDF) files. PDF files are compact and download quickly. They open and print easily from both Macintosh and PC computers. The pages you print from PDF files will look almost the same as they do on screen.

To view PDFs, you need Adobe Acrobat Reader, which you can download for free from the Adobe website. The software is self-installing; just double-click on the installer file. Depending on your computer, Adobe Acrobat Reader may take awhile to download, but you will only have to do this once.

Many of our PDFs are made with bookmarks (a content list on the left-hand side of the page that lets you link to different sections in the PDF). Some of the multilingual PDF files on this site contain English bookmarks. To open these bookmarks, click on the Bookmarks tab, which you’ll find along the left-hand side of the PDF.